Honest At-Home Yoga Tutorial

Doing yoga at home is perfect for those who are too lazy to leave their apartments, too cheap to pay $20 for a yoga class, or too insecure to risk having the instructor single you out for an adjustment so that everyone else in the class feels superior to you.

All you need to do is make space for your mat on your bedroom floor by shoving everything you own onto your bed.

As you sit at the front of your mat, become aware of your body and how terrible your posture is. Now is a good time to set an intention for today's practice. Maybe you want to be able to climb a single flight of subway stairs without pathetically losing your breath. Maybe you just want to think of yourself as the kind of person who has their shit together enough to do yoga once a week.

From this seated position, let your breath slow and deepen. As you breathe, draw your awareness to the fact that your roommates can definitely hear your deep breathing and they probably think you're masturbating.

When you're ready, bring yourself to standing and we'll begin with sun salutations.

[Sun Salutations]

Bring your hands up and for the first time in today's practice, feel a little bit embarrassed at how New-Agey and cheesy you feel doing this.

Let your arms fall to your sides and hit the wall because your room definitely isn't large enough to do yoga in.

And step your legs back and flow into downward facing dog. Really stretch to feel every last bit of frustration that you can't get your back straight enough. And return to standing. After two or three sun salutations, get bored and skip ahead to the more interesting poses.

[Standing Forward Bend]

Bend from the hip joints and let the head go, noticing the dead skin on your big toe's cuticle. Get distracted by picking at it for a few breaths.

By the way, while you're watching this tutorial on your laptop and following along, you may also want to watch a TV show in another window because yoga tutorials are extremely boring. You may feel as if an invisible string is slowly pulling your attention more and more towards the TV program you're watching until gradually you're just sitting on your mat watching television.

[Triangle Pose]

From downward dog step your right leg up to move into Triangle Pose. Breathe into this pose for 8 breaths. If you're uncomfortable here, just breathe faster. That way you can tell yourself you're doing the full pose but you won't have to hold it as long.

Turn your back foot out for the same stretch on the other side. This will begin the part of your practice where you get weirdly obsessed with the asymmetry of your body and why you're so much more flexible on one side than the other.

[Reverse Triangle Pose]

From here we move into Reverse Triangle, by placing your right hand outside your left foot. Going into this pose it's important to have a long narrow stance so that the twist throws you totally off balance and you become tangled and fall over.

From there, adjust into a stance that you think looks makes you look like a statuesque yogi, then catch a glimpse of yourself in the mirror and realize that you look like a crazed hunchback.

[Warrior One]

Let's move into Warrior One. You know, one benefit of bringing your practice into your home is that you can fart freely. Go ahead. Fart a lot. It's your bedroom and your practice.

[Warrior Two]

Move into Warrior Two and instantly begin pretending that you are Xena, Warrior Princess. From here, [she leaves the mat to look at her phone] bring your focus to a text that you just received, and how you should word your response. Those of you who are feeling comfortable here may choose the more advanced variation of checking Instagram or Twitter. If not, there's no shame in sticking with texting.

[Tree Pose]

As we move into our balance asanas, try to balance by staring at a spot on the wall with near-psychotic determination. Be sure your mouth muscles are engaged and quivering like Hector Salamanca from Breaking Bad.

[Wide-Legged Forward Bend]

Bend at the hips with a straight back. Your hamstrings are too tight to reach the floor while doing the pose correctly, and you feel vaguely like you heard somewhere that it's bad to lock your knees, so just bend them a lot so that you don't actually have to stretch that much.

Get really dizzy from coming up too fast and just sit in Child's Pose for about 10 minutes, then look at the clock and feel impressed with how long you've been working out. It's time to move on to seated stretches.

[Staff Pose]

For seated poses, you want to make sure you're on your sit bones by pulling your gross butt fat out of the way.

[Bridge Pose]

Now let's move into Bridge Pose. This asana is incredibly restorative to the part of your mind that wonders how the hell this was so easy when you were 10, and what has happened to your body since then to make it so stiff but yet so weak.

You may want to do more seated stretches, or get overly ambitious and make a disastrous attempt at a headstand. When you're finished, lie down into Savasana.

[Savasana]

Feel a giant rush of relief that you're at the part where you get to lie down and relax, immediately followed by a small wave of worry that you're somehow doing the pose incorrectly even though literally all you have to do is lie there and do nothing. Attempt to clear your mind and instead think about how bad you are at clearing your mind. As soon as you do manage to clear your mind, let your mind instantly fill with thoughts of how great it is that you successfully cleared your mind. Repeat this cycle for whatever time you need to take.

When you're ready, open your eyes, turn onto your right side and come up to sitting.

To clean your mat, realize that you don't know how you're supposed to clean a yoga mat, so just let it get smellier and smellier until you have to throw it away.